Militarism and imperialism in the 21st century

Claude Serfati* from International
Viewpoint

The relationship between militarism, war and capitalism
has a new relevance at the beginning of the 21st century. This ‘war without
limits’, the new political programme adopted by the Bush administration, marks
a significant change in the militarism of US capitalism and, more than ever, the
globalization of capital and militarism appear as two aspects of imperialist
domination.

Rosa Luxemburg noted that “militarism has a
specific function in the history of capital. It accompanies every historic phase
ofaccumulation”1. Her analyses bring out what one might nowadays
call the ‘historicity’ of the relationship of militarism to capital and they
retain their pertinence today. She defines “the imperialist phase of
accumulation [as] a phase of the global competition of capital [which] has the
entire word as its theatre. Here the methods employed are colonial policy, the
system of international borrowing, the policy of spheres of interest, war.
Violence, cheating, pillage are openly employed, without any mask”. This is
contrary to the “bourgeois liberal theory [which] separates the economic
domain of capital from the other aspect, that of the blows of force, considered
as more or less fortuitous, of foreign policy”.

Luxemburg stressed in a very contemporary manner that “political
violence is also the instrument and vehicle of the economic process; the duality
of the aspects of accumulation conceals the same organic phenomenon, originating
in the conditions of capitalist reproduction” [stress by this author].

In his polemic against Dühring, Engels analyses the relationship between
militarism and the technological development of capitalism. History shows that
the conduct of wars rests on the production of weapons, which itself depends on
the state of the economy, more precisely on industrial and technological
development, because “industry remains industry, whether it is applied to the
p roduction or the destruction of things”2.
Engels notes the radical changes that took place after capitalism came to
dominate the world. “The modern warship is not only a product, but atthe same time a specimen of modern large-scale industry, a floating
factory”. For him “militarism dominates and is swallowing Europe”; and
this formula would find a tragic confirmation in the war that broke out between
the European imperialisms in 1914.

Weapons production is not only “a specimen of modern large-scale
industry”; since the Second World War, it has been at the heart of
technological trajectories essential to the mode of production (aeronautics and
space, electronics, the nuclear industry). The military expenditure of the
United States, but also that of the other imperialist countries, reached
extraordinarily high levels in the subsequent five decades, supposedly to meet
the threat represented by the USSR. In the latter country, the gigantic sums
devoted to defence consolidated the ruling caste and its parasitic existence,
while also contributing to the bleeding of productive and financial resources.

The outstanding fact since the Second World War is a deep implantation of
the military-industrial system in the economy and society of the US, which has
in no way been weakened by the disappearance of the USSR; on the contrary it is
now entering a new stage of consolidation. This strengthening of the
military-industrial system rests on a conjuncture of factors: an industrial
concentration and an ever closer liaison of the weapons companies with financial
capital, an increase in the military budget embarked on by Clinton in 1999 and
considerably amplified by Bush, and a strengthened presence in information and
communication technologies (ICT). These technologies benefited from Reagan’s
Strategic Defense Initiative (‘star wars’) and play a determinant role in
‘information domination’ and ‘network centric warfare’ 3which
were the favored themes of Pentagon strategists in the 1990s.

Military supremacy has allowed US weapons companies to conquer a central
position in the development of ICT, dominated in the 1990s by the civil
companies (the so-called ‘new economy’ and its associated start-ups).

The weapons companies must also develop new weapons systems for ground
forces. The preparation of ‘urban wars’ (the expression employed by the
Pentagon experts) waged by soldiers armed with hyper-sophisticated weapons,
occupies an important place in the military budgets. The aim is to wage war
against the populations of the immense agglomerations in the countries of the
South (those of South America obsess US strategists), and eventually against the
‘dangerous classes’ of the cities of the North. One can then envisage that
the major influence the weapons groups have acquired inside the federal and
state institutions since the second world war, together with the broadening of
the ‘national security agenda’ to non-military objectives 4which
increasingly concern aspects of social and private life, will accelerate the
formation of a ‘military-security system’. This latter will, in the coming
years, play a much more important role than that of the ‘military-industrial
complex’ during the Cold War. The formation of this military-security system
gives the US state a considerable power.

Imperialism
in the 21st century

We are far from the decline of the ‘state form’ of the domination of
capital, which, according to Hardt and Negri, would give way to an ‘Empire’
inside of which capital and labour would confront each other without mediation 5.
To maintain its domination, capital cannot do without a political apparatus,
institutions (judiciary, military and so on) which have been constituted,
strengthened and streamlined for two centuries in the framework of the states of
the dominant capitalist countries. ‘World capitalism’, the sense spoken of
by these authors, does not exist. Capital, as a social relationship, certainly
has a propensity transcend national frontiers and other barriers (forms of
socio-political o rganization for example). The “world market is contained in
the very notion of capital” as Marx said, but it is a process marked by
contradictions which are expressed in inter-capitalist and inter-imperialist
rivalries as well as in crises. That is why the global extension of capital has
always taken and will continue to take on a physiognomy inextricably linked to
the inter-state relationship of f o rces and its associated violence.

The domination of the US over the other imperialist countries is obvious.
That is one reason why the breakout of inter-imperialist wars like those that
took place in the 20th century is improbable. The integration of transatlantic
capital, between the US and a part of the European Union, continues, and has
constituted one of the distinctive features of ‘globalization’ in the late
20th century. The dominant classes of the US and the EU are, to a certain
extent, in the situation that Marx described in relation to the competition
between capitalists: “while there is little love lost between them in
competition among themselves”, they “form a veritable freemason society vis-à-vis
the whole working-class” and, need we add, vis-à-vis the peoples of the
countries subjected to their domination 6.

Globalization of capital and militarism

The improbability of wars between the dominant capitalist powers does not
render obsolete the relation between war and imperialism identified by Marxism
at the beginning of the 20th century. It is enough to think of what would happen
if the capitalist transformation of China under the control of the bureaucracy
of the Chinese CPcame to threaten the US on the economic terrain 7.
The ultra-imperialism that would allow capital to overcome its contradictions,
as imagined by Kautsky, is surely not on the agenda. War maintains and expands
its role in the current phase of the globalization of capital.

The globalization of capital does not involve an expansion of capitalism
defined as an enlargement of the reproduction of value on a planetary scale. It
leads rather to a growth of predatory operations on the part of capital, whose
‘property rights’ (over financial assets) allow it to collect financial
incomes as well as to appropriate the processes of life itself. “There are not
too many necessities of life produced, in proportion to the existing population.
Quite the reverse. Too little is produced to decently and humanely satisfy the
wants of the great mass.”8

It is this contradiction that the globalization of capital has carried to
an unequalled level, crushing most of the countries of Africa and, in the course
of the 1990s, plunging the ‘emergent countries’ of Asia and Latin America
into crisis. The state has always played a major role in this process of
expropriation of the producers by capital, not only in the so-called phase of
‘primitive accumulation’ but also during the colonial conquests whose
objective was to submit the peoples and territories of the planet to the
domination of capital.

The violence of the state is more than ever necessary today, in polar
opposition to the mystifications that associate the ‘markets’ and free trade
with peace and democracy. The globalization of capital is accompanied by a
process of commodification that could be defined as the extension of the area
where capital can exercise its property rights. Such is indeed the prior
condition to the existence of ‘markets’, whose objective and effect are, on
the one hand, to increase the dependence of the producers while rendering them
more ‘free’—that is, more constrained to work for capital—and on the
other hand, to enslave new social groups, in particular in the dominated
countries. These areas are not only geographical territories, but also new areas
of private appropriation, like the biosphere (permits for the right to pollute),
the life process (patents on seeds and so on), and increasingly rights of
intellectual property whose incessant extension represents a serious threat to
human liberty. All these objectives cannot be attained without the use of
violence.

The US is at the centre of
the globalization of capital. The strengthening of militarism observed in the
1990s is not an additional extra tacked on to an otherwise healthy economic
functioning. The globalization of capital and militarism are two aspects of the
“same organic phenomenon” as Rosa Luxemburg put it, and it is in the US that
they are at their most interdependent. Political-military power was a
determinant in the process that allowed the US to attract influxes of money
capital seeking high ‘security’ in the 1990s, with an accelerated tempo
after the Asian economic crisis of 1997.

Finally, the US economy was hit by recession in 2000 9.
It is not possible to analyze here the mechanisms, but the important thing to
understand is that, if the US is at the heart of the globalization of capital,
it is also at the heart of its contradictions, much deeper than can be m e a s u
red by the indicators used to characterize a recession. The rapid development of
these contradictions has given the lie to those who thought that the US
constituted an ‘island of prosperity’ in the ocean of global devastation pro
d u c e d by the domination of financial capital (the ‘new economy’). The
economic contradictions have been amplified and not reduced by the
implementation of the budget programmes decided after September 11, 2001, for
which the term ‘class war’ has been used10. In this context, the
‘war without limits’ to which the Bush Administration has committed itself
is in relation with the trajectory of capitalism over the past 20 years. This
policy expresses the interests of a financial oligarchy, whose material bases
rest on the pillage of natural resources(with oil, of course, in the first
rank); and on the endless payment of the debt, even this endangers and threatens
the very existence of the most vulnerable social classes and peoples. The
control that the US and the other dominant countries of the ‘international
community’ are in the p rocess of exerting—through forms of d i rect
management, mandate or p rotectorate—has, still less than the colonial
conquests of imperialism at the beginning of the 20th century, the p retension
and the possibility of stimulating the economic development of the dominated
countries. As shown by the tragic example of the African continent over the last
20 years, what is on the agenda now is the dismembering of the states of the
‘South’, which cannot resist the consequences of imperialist domination.

The social classes whose existence rests on a mode of social domination
which privileges to this point the appropriation of the value created by the
producers and encourages still more predation, can only have very short term
concerns, without regard for the catastrophic social and environmental
consequences for humanity. They need governments and state institutions that
assure them the full enjoyment and security of their property rights. The more
financial capital succeeds in extending its logic, the more the need for armed
force grows.

Claude
Serfati is a lecturer and researcher in economics at the university of
Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines in France

NOTES

1
Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The Accumulation of Capital’, Book 2, Chapter 32
‘Militarism, Field of Action for Capital’.2 Friedrich Engels, ‘Anti-Dühring’, Part II: Political Economy, III.
Theory of Force3 Military
superiority now rests on the efficiency of communications, the power of
information tools, the precision of weapons guidance and so on. 4 The
enlargement of the notion of ‘national security’to the defence of
‘globalization’was already present under Clinton and it has been developed
by the Bush Administration. 5 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, 'Empire'
(Cambridge MAand London: Harvard University Press, 2000) 6 See my contribution
“Une bourgeoisie mondiale pour un capital financier mondialisé?” in Séminaire
d'Etudes Marxistes, ‘La bourgeoisie : classe dirigeante d'un nouveau
capitalisme’, Syllepse, 2001 7 A significant part of US military programmes
(including the anti-missiles defence system) are directly focused against China
8 K Marx, ‘Capital’, Volume 3, Part 3, Chapter 15, ‘Exposition of the
Internal Contradictions of the Law’. 9 According to the figures of the Bureau
of Economic Analysis, the rate of profitability of the capital of companies
began to fall in 1997. 10 The title of the dossier in Business Week (January 20,
2003) on Bush’s proposed tax-cutting programme. The
opposition: Hollywood, Los Angeles